A couple of days ago I said I’d gotten into playing Cult of the Lamb. Well I finished it and as of right now you can buy it for 20% of until December 12th. Note: the game isn’t really about story, but there are total spoilers below.

As I said in my previous post the plot was pretty much what you would expect from the outset, the Evil God you’re serving is your final boss fight after you’ve defeated the False Gods who tried to kill you at the beginning of the game. Let’s put some names to these characters: the Evil God you serve is called “The One Who Waits” while the False Gods you fight are the four “Bishops of the Old Faith”. The only sizzle to the plot is the tiny bit of interest that Bishop #3 is scared of you instead of angry and murder-y towards you like Bishops #1 and #2, and that Bishop #4 basically knows you’re going to kill them all and isn’t too upset about it when you speak to her. They throw a tiny interesting twist that The One Who Waits was originally Bishop #5, but they were so proud of that revelation that they have Bishop #4 repeat it to you verbatim about three different times, killing its gravity.

The Bishops are vaguely themed after a couple of different things, but this theming in incredibly bare-bones. The first 3 Bishops are all obviously deformed, #1 has his eyes removed, #2 has her throat slit, #3 has his ears removed. The in-game achievements then spell this theming out for you as “See no Evil, Speak no Evil, Hear no Evil.” Bishop #4 has a head wound, so “Think no Evil,” and The One Who Waits gives you an achievement for “Do no Evil” to complete the set. Cute. Then they’re vaguely themed after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, only here it’s War, Famine, Pestilence, and Entropy/Change. Bishop #2 (Famine) will make your cultists starve when you meet her, Bishop #3 (Pestilence) will sicken them and Bishop #4 (Entropy/Change) will turn them against you so you have no choice but to kill them.

By the way, I’m saying “Bishop #whatever” here because I genuinely don’t remember these guys’ names, they were not really key to my enjoyment of the game.

The only sizzle the this story is that The One Who Waits and Bishop #4 were an item long ago. The One Who Waits was the god of Death, the ultimate inevitability. But his association with Bishop #4 (who’s dominion was Entropy/Change) screwed him up somehow, you can’t change what’s inevitable but he damn well tried to. This led to the others imprisoning him and killing off all lambs (I guess?) so he could never return. But again Bishop #4 is all about Entropy/Change (it honestly wasn’t clear to me which) and so she knows this situation won’t last, knows that she’ll get killed by the Lamb (your protagonist), and even knows the Lamb will kill The One Who Waits, which indeed you do at the end of the game.

So that’s the story of the thing. I’m pretty sure my few paragraphs are about as long as all the dialogue in the game because story really isn’t the focus here, gameplay is.

As for the gameplay, remember I discussed last time that the game is really made up of 2 separate games that vaguely tie together: you have a cult who you have to manage and who reward you with better weapons, and you go dungeon diving with your better weapons to get items and cult members to expand your cult.

Unfortunately the cult ran out of fun things for me way before the dungeon diving combat sections. I had bought every weapon/card upgrade in the game by the time I’d killed Bishop #3, but I still had #4 and The One Who Waits so I kind of ignored the cult and focused on them. This was to my detriment, I hadn’t noticed that each dungeon you entered had a minimum number of cultists required to let you enter, for dungeons 1, 2 and 3 I had had exactly the minimum number and so I actually thought this wasn’t a minimum requirement, it was just the game alerting me to how many cultist I had at the moment. But Dungeon #5 requires 20 cultists so after getting all geared up to kill The One Who Waits I suddenly had to run around and find 6 new cultists in order to proceed.

Like I said managing the cult just isn’t fun enough on its own to justify it’s gameplay when it isn’t providing you those sweet combat level-ups. This isn’t a Rimworld sort of game, the cultists don’t have enough personality or enough uniqueness to really make you care about them. And the good or evil rules you can lay down for your cult are quite interesting in how they can make your cult more efficient, but they grow stale over time.

Remember, I had a rule where I could murder anyone in the cult at any time and all my cult members gained faith when elderly members were murdered. That was a fun little synergy, as was throwing a Feast when Bishop #2 made all my cultists starve. But the cult system isn’t interesting or challenging enough to keep that fun going for the length of the game, which is unfortunate.

The combat sections however are quite fun for the entire length of the game, especially as you start getting into the weird and unique late-game benefits you can acquire. To remind you of how the combat works: you enter a dungeon and get a random weapon and a random magic spell with which to kill your enemies. As you continue through the dungeon you’ll find rooms containing either cards or new weapons/magic for you to choose from.

The cards are pretty sweet, giving you things like extra health, extra damage, or the ability to drop a bomb whenever you dodge-roll. The weapons can be too, with unique abilities like poison, stealing health, or summoning ghosts. One late-game item you can equip though is a new robe which gives you 4 cards at the start of the dungeon but no new cards during the dungeon. The trade-off is clear as getting these super-powers early might be worth having slightly less of them overall, but what wasn’t clear was that this ability also dramatically lowers the number of new weapons you get as the weapon rooms are removed also. I mostly liked using Axes, Hammers, or if I had to Swords. I didn’t like the Daggers or the Gloves, but since I had so few new weapons when using that robe I kept getting stuck with weapons I didn’t like which was unfortunate.

I want to talk more about the combat but I feel I just don’t have the gaming vocabulary to do it justice since I play so few games of this type. I like that the enemies often glow when they’re about to make an attack, as it helps you learn their attack pattern and dodgeroll out of the way. I like that you can cancel an attack into a dodgeroll or a dodgeroll into an attack at any time. I do not like that you can’t cancel a magic spell this way, and find it weird that when aiming magic spells the game slows down time to help you out a bit.

The early game enemies are all about learning their patterns and dodgerolling at the right time. Later enemies start throwing out loads of projectiles (is this what folks call “Bullet Hell“?) which require you to focus on the projectiles and dodgeroll through them to escape. Nearly every attack is telegraphed in this game, so I’m sure speedrunners and the like can learn to play the whole game without taking damage.

I think the boss fights are interesting, they all have a similar gimmick of combining a massive number of projectiles with a massive number of minor enemies plus a big enemy boss, all of which makes it hard to know what you need to concentrate on and makes it easier to take hits. Still the boss fights against the 4 Bishops felt tangibly easier that the dungeons and minibosses that preceded them, I wonder if this was a deliberate move on the part of the devs to make the Bishops feel climactic while still letting you beat them on your first try and feel powerful in doing so. The one exception is Bishop #5 aka The One Who Waits and that’s because he doesn’t even have a dungeon, you just walk straight into his boss fight. I guess again they wanted that climactic feeling and a dungeon would kind of ruin it.

What few quibbles I have left are mostly minor things that other roguelike enjoyers (this is apparently also classified as a roguelike) probably don’t think are issues. I always hated a run where I got stuck with a weapon I didn’t like (say a Dagger) for too long, and sometimes the cards just are useless for you. But whatever, it was a fun game.